Abstract
An estimated 7.8 million people live and work in the United States without authorized status. We examined the extent to which legal status makes them vulnerable to employment discrimination despite technically being protected under labor laws. We used three decades of data from the nationally representative National Agricultural Workers Survey, which provides four categories of self-reported legal status. We first investigated how legal status affected the wages and income of Mexican immigrant farmworkers using linear regression analyses. Then, we used Blinder-Oaxaca models to decompose the wage and income gap across the 1989 to 2016 period, categorized into five eras. Unauthorized farmworkers earned significantly lower wages and income compared to those with citizen status, though the gap narrowed over time. Approximately 57% of the wage gap across the entire period was unexplained by compositional characteristics. While the unauthorized/citizen wage gap narrowed across eras, the unexplained proportion increased substantially—from approximately 52% to 93%. That the unexplained proportion expanded during eras with increased immigration enforcement and greater migrant selectivity supports claims that unauthorized status functions as a defining social position. This evidence points to the need for immigration reform that better supports fair labor practices for immigrants.
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Notes
We use “unauthorized workers” to mean immigrants who do not have the legal paperwork required to be officially employed in the United States, yet hold employment. Although the term “undocumented” is often preferred by workers, our analysis is of legal status as it relates to employment, and so we believe “unauthorized” is a more appropriate term for this context.
The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) also asks a question about legal status; however, the unauthorized category is only available for analysis in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Restricted Data Centers. The papers that we are aware of that use the SIPP to ascertain differences by legal status do not use the restricted version of the variable, but rather construct a residual undocumented variable via a stepped process (see Hall et al., 2010, for an example).
Though SComm was replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program in 2014, the differences were considered marginal and President Trump reinstated the program in 2017.
The labor protections provided by FLSA and anti-discrimination statutes like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act apply to all persons “employed by an employer” (Civil Rights Act of 1964 1964). That unauthorized immigrants are thus persons entitled to protection by these laws is a matter the EEOC considers “settled principle” (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 2002), even given the Hoffman Plastics decision, the United States Supreme Court Case Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. versus National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 535 U.S. 137 (2002), in which the Court interpreted IRCA to mean that the punitive provisions of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) did not apply to workers who ‘knowingly broke immigration law’ and denied back pay to an undocumented worker laid off for participation in an union organizing campaign.
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Scott, J., Hale, J.M. & Padilla, Y.C. Immigration Status and Farmwork: Understanding the Wage and Income Gap Across U.S. Policy and Economic Eras, 1989–2016. Popul Res Policy Rev 40, 861–893 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-021-09652-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-021-09652-9